Teaching with Instructure Canvas

It is nearly 10 PM and I just got off the phone with a student. I actually talked with two students tonight. Just helping them get into Bb 9 and get going. Enrollment for this course keeps growing. It is around 35 right now. Ya I have lost track.

I have some students who have already turned in assignments. So I was able to go and grade the assignments using the grade center. I had never done this before, and it was pretty easy. However there are a couple of things I will point out.

In Bb Vista you have an assignment drop box where you go to do everything. In Bb 9.1 you visit the grade center. So I did selecting assignments. In the column for that particular assignment (in the grade center) a nice green icon appears if there is an assignment that needs to be graded. Pretty cool indicator. Naturally I went to that icon to click on it. Well when you get to the that cell in the grade book a drop down box appears, you click on it and you can choose the attempt to grade. Pretty slick. I really like how the grading works for an assignment. One of the new options after grading a particular item, is save and next. It brought up the next student, expect that student had not turned anything in yet. Since I only had 4 that have turned it in so far, and the due date is still a few days away, I was hoping it would go to the next submitted assignment. It did not.

So thinking this through I can see that if the due date had passed, this is a quick way to grade everybody including those who did not submit. I am thinking, what if it gave you all those who had turned something in first, then went to those who had not. That seems logical to me.

The other cool option is you have the ability to turn off the students names so you can grade blind. That is a feature I know has been asked for on the forums for many years. I will have to give that a try.

I found a render error with discussions in Bb 9.1 using a Mac and Firefox or Safari. I reported that to UEN who has reported that to Bb. Basically as you expand discussions, the nice background web 2.0 background box does not expand down with the discussions. Causing them to be a bit unreadable when they extend into the grey background below the box. Not a big problem, but weird.

I am also noticing some issues with the VTE using Safari. Firefox is much better, but still a few quarks.

I consider the VTE a very important tool for faculty to use to build courses.

Another thing I would like is the due date to show on an assignment when it is in a content area. They do not. Perhaps a check box to allow it to show. I can see there might be some who do not want it, but others might.

So nearing the end of the first week. Assignments are not due until Wed by Midnight. But there are a lot of discussion postings, as students are introducing themselves, and a few questions in the Unit 1 discussion as students are figuring things out.

More to come

I actually had a student stop in. This student could not get one of the videos I created to play. It kept telling her she needed Adobe Flash 9 or higher. She had 10 but no go. So I checked it out, and sure enough I had a bad link. My videos are links to videos sitting on the USU podcasting server and we have a custom Flash video window using the JW media player to play the H.264 (MPEG 4) videos in.

Anyway, an error on my part.

Isn’t that what the first week of class is for online courses? Working out the little bugs.

Day two of my online course. I have my first office hours tonight in Wimba Classroom from 9:00 – 10:00 PM. I am not expecting anyone to drop in, but you never know. Tomorrow Wednesday night is the first f2f class for those taking the on campus section. I will get some good observations watching them get logged into Blackboard. I had two students contact me today who just registered for the course. So I put them into Bb 9.1.

I had one minor setback today. The Unit 1 page I had created using a Blackboard ITEM was not rendering right for students. So I had to do some troubleshooting and rebuild it to get it to work. Reported it to UEN who is working with Blackboard so they can figure out what went wrong.

I have had 10 students post so far in the “Introduce Yourself” discussion. I have had over 20 log into the class. One has dropped after figuring out that the course was not what he wanted. Classes usually take a couple of weeks to settle down.

Roger Karren in the ITLS department is getting some SFTP accounts set up for the students so they can have a real website to load their web pages on. I worked on Unit 2 getting some video presentations created. I created one on how the internet works. Here is one I also created on absolute and relative links/path for websites. An important concept for students to know and understand.

http://podcasts.usu.edu/MediaPlayer/player.html?filename=Podcasts/inst_5265_6265_reeve/2010-05-13/Relative_and_Absolute_paths_and_linking-video

Late Sunday night I flipped the switch so students could now get into the class. All the students will be looking in Bb Vista, so I put an announcement on the home page in Bb Vista with a link to Bb 9.1. I actually opened my Bb Vista course a week ago to students so they could learn ahead of time what was going to happen, along with a copy of the syllabus and book information.

Looking inside Bb 9.1 this morning, two students have already logged in. One took advantage of logging in just after 1:00 am. I am sure they are figuring things out.

I have put a post in Unit 1 explaining why we are piloting and what they can expect with a request for them to speak up if they run into any problems, or see something that is cool. I have told them about the iPad App, and given them heads up about the SMS stuff we will be testing.

My class starts Monday, and I am far from ready. I have spent the last few evenings working on content for the course. There are 28 students now registered for this course, that is more than I expected. There is still a lot to learn about Bb 9.1. I spent some time on the phone this week with the folks from Connect Ed who are interested in getting feedback from this course on how the alerts (SMS and text to speach via cell phone) work. So we have some ideas on what we can do, watch for, and get feedback from students. I appreciate the folks at Connect ED reaching out to offer their input and assistance. I will worry about this towards the end of next week.

Getting students into Blackboard 9.1

Since this is a pilot the Bb 9.1 system is not integrated with our Banner yet. Our current Vista implementation does real time integration, meaning, if a student registered right now, they would appear in Bb within a couple of minutes. This has been a really cool thing for students. Especially those who are adjusting their schedule the first two weeks of the semester. We will be exploring how Bb 9.1 integrates with Banner down the road. I hope it is similar.

So for the pilot Neal Legler and Scott Allen are working on the best approach to batch import the students into Bb 9.1 With 28 we can hand enter if we need too for this pilot. They are also working to get LDAP going. A little more complicated, as it involves our security and network teams who have to punch holes through the firewall for trusted systems that will use our authentication system. And I am sure all the little settings and quarks that go along with this.

LDAP would be a bonus and not something I was expecting. This would mean students could use their A# and strong password that they use at USU for email, Banner, Blackboard Vista and other system to log in.

So it will be a long weekend for me as I add content to the course. I am creating lots of Camtasia movies. and working through the examples in the book as I build.

Real live pilots are fantastic because they force you to really do thingss. You see, real live students with grades, scholarships, and courses are involved.

Lots of people have offered to help for which I am grateful.

One last shout out of thanks to Matt Davis and Blackboard. I was stuck trying to figure something out so I emailed him, and 20 minutes later we were on a WebEx figuring it out. Kathy Saville from Marshall University joined us and we worked through it.

Kevin

After playing around in Bb 9.1 for sometime I have come up with a semi-workable way to lay out my unit pages. What I really like about 9.1 is that when you create a content folder, it is very similar to what I was used to in Vista. However it has some advantages in that you can create an almost seemless page with several different elements in it. What I am struggling with is the Visual Text Box Editor or what they call VTE. I am using a Mac and Safari or Firefox, and it is not behaving how it should. I can not get the sizes and fonts to render correctly. There is a bug.

There is no way to show this off in a image or two so I am creating a Camtasia video to go along with it.

Video of me showing my course layout

I created 5 or 6 video demonstrations this evening for Unit 1. These were created using Camtasia for the Mac and Apples Podcast Producer. Once recorded I export them as an MPEG 4 then use Podcast Producer at Utah State University to make them the right file size and upload them into the streaming/podcast server on campus. They then appear in a blog I can include in the class. When they are ready for viewing I get a nice email with a link to to the video and audio file, and also the video in a JW media player, and a link to them embedded in the Apple blog.

I have not determined exactly how they will appear in the Bb course yet. There are several options. Neal Legler and I sat down together on Friday afternoon and tried to figure out the best way. We found several options to include the videos in Bb 9.1

On Friday, UEN and Blackboard enabled the text messaging module in Bb 9.1. This means students can opt in to get alerts on a variety of things, and they choose what they get. For example, if they want to get a text message alert or phone call regarding a overdue assignment, or an assignment that is coming due or an announcement. There are many checkboxes they can choose from. There is also an instructor notification tool, so the instructor can send out a notification to students should he need to get a message to them right away. There is a need for this. Again students have to sign up to receive texts, and they can choose not too.

This module is a integration of Connect ED, a tool Blackboard has for emergency notification. Now they have integrated it with Bb Learn so text messaging, email alerts etc can be added to the course.

Utah State University uses Connect Ed for the emergency alert notification SMS, voice, and email. However I am told that using the system along with the Learn Platform (Bb 9.1) is a separate license and cost.

I am excited to try this out and see how valuable a tool it becomes for both instructor or student. With this generation, it should be a winner.

So I have my course menu layed on the left menu area. I am not sure what they call it. My syllabus is a PDF file, but I could not easily figure out how to add just a file to the left menu, so I decided to create a content area I called Syllabus.

What was cool was I was able to add a textbook and give Bb the title of it, and it searched some database somewhere and found it along with the authors and ISBN number. Cool.

Next I created a item in Bb and copied from a Word Doc, and pasted my syllabus into the Visual Text Editor. A WYSIWYG box. I noticed it double spaced my lines. 5 minutes of clean up and I have my syllabus there. I have a nice syllabus now. Changing the font is not working. I am guessing the underlying garbage that came over from Word is causing it from rendering correctly.

As for the Calendar. With the notification and Dashboard I thought it would be good to each Unit on the Calendar for the week we would be working on. In Bb Vista I could put the item without putting a start and stop time. I can not see that right now in Bb 9.1. I also can not see how to link to a content area, or Learning Module, or any tool for that matter. I want to link to that Units materials. I can do that in Bb Vista. I am hopeful there is a way to do that.

The way I see it, a student who hits the course home page or module page sees the calendar of items this week. They can click the Unit 1 or Unit 2 etc and go directly to that content. I hope that is possible.

Still exploring. Will let you know what I find.

The first image is how my course looks now in Bb Vista. It is basically the three icon approach except we used some CSS and to add a background image and the icons are the text Begin Here, Syllabus and Course Materials. This could just be a regular Vista course with 3 icons on the home page.

This is what my default home page is like in Bb

This is my Vista course

Here is my default home page in Bb 9.1 Bb 9.1 allows you to chose anything as your home page. By default it is the modules page. This is like a portal with all kinds of blocks. It appears that I can choose what module blocks appear here. So if I set them can a student customize them for their own view or do they stay set for a course?

If I do not use this at my home page is this information available to student somewhere else like at the Institution level? I do not know. I know I can make a content area (basically a folder for you CE/Vista folks) I can also put my 3 icons/text on the left in the Course Menu area.

I really do not know which way would be best. I may ask the students and have a couple of options and show them, and get their input.

More to come, but I need to start building my course